


three, two, one

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Multi, Post-Canon, Suicide, Training trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12790569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: Maki came to terms with living and dying alone a long time ago. But now, she's rethinking whether she can truly live such a detached life. What happens when she's forced to do exactly that?***SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME***





	three, two, one

The third time Kaito drags Maki out of her lab for training, she stops pulling back. She hates to admit it, and she’d never tell anyone this, but she’s starting to enjoy a little bit of exercise with the two people in the academy that she doesn’t hate. And it’s quite nice, she thinks, to finish before them both – barely breaking a sweat – and sit back to watch them push themselves. Mainly, she’s seen Shuichi grow stronger, mentally as well as physically, and there’s an emotion not unlike pride in her chest to watch him come back from Kaede’s death and lead them through the mysteries of the academy with his quiet intelligence.

Of course, she knows that Kaito has been getting weaker, but she doesn’t ask – it’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s just that she fears the answer would shatter the almost-happiness that she’s found in these nights. She wants things to stay like this forever, a looping repeat of one hour underneath the stars.

When Shuichi manages to beat his personal best, she and Kaito try to high-five him at the same time, and they end up awkwardly colliding hands and then laughing for a moment; Maki silently, Shuichi quietly, Kaito louder than anything she’s ever heard. Logically, she knows that he’s the glue that holds their little trio together. Every night, after training, she tells herself that she won’t let the mastermind take this from them.

But she loses that bet. When the rocket crashes through the ceiling, she can’t bear to look at what comes out. It’s weak to close her eyes, so she puts on a stone-faced demeanour and lets her eyes stare long enough at Kaito’s weak, lifeless smile until the blood on his body dissolves out of her peripheral vision. His illness killed him, in the end, and that’s what she tries to come back to every time thoughts of the mastermind stream through her mind in hot, thick, red flashes. She sees Shuichi crying, and she’s jealous of him; nobody blames _him_ for expressing emotion. But she’s Maki Harukawa, and she has a duty to herself not to break down her own façade. Still, she holds onto Shuichi’s arm, and lets everyone else think that she’s steadying him, when really, they’re both just as weak as each other without Kaito to prop them up.

That night, they train, still. Shuichi makes a point about Kaito saying they should turn their mental pain into physical pain, and that’s exactly what she does, completing multiple reps of push ups and sit ups until Shuichi has to pull her off the ground, shaking, and take her back to her room. On the walk back, she looks up at the stars and imagines that they might shine brighter now, but she hates clichés almost as much as she hates herself. This time, she leans on Shuichi for support, and he doesn’t say a word.

Kaito wanted his death to be the last of it. Maki wanted it to stop just before, with Kokichi crushed into nonexistence and no punishment thereafter, but her wish was unfulfilled.

When Maki discovers Shuichi’s body, peacefully composed, in his talent lab, her first move is to bring one of the blankets from the other end of the room to cover him with as he sleeps. But, upon approaching him, she knows what death is like in close proximity, and _this is it._ But he can’t be – not Shuichi too. Not when he looks so at peace; smiling like Kaito did, the mirror of the one who had gone before. His hair falls slightly in his eyes, and she notices that his hat is in his hand, an open book in the other. Just as he would have wanted to be finally seen, she thinks.

Halfway through the trial, Himiko wants to give up. She’s seen enough death, and Maki can’t blame her, but wanting to die in the face of her dead friends is a mockery, and Maki tells her this. She never expected to be taking on the role of giving morale to others, but in the absence of Kaito, someone needs to push everyone through. So she plays detective, she plays optimist, and when she rules the death a suicide, she disguises her anger as pride that the mastermind couldn’t kill either Kaito or Shuichi. They both died on their own terms, and now Maki has nothing left in the world to love.

Then there’s Kiibo’s sacrifice, and Tsumugi’s well-deserved death, which leaves Maki and Himiko to be reborn from the rubble.

She was never an assassin, but she has false memories that give her the knowledge of how to kill. It’s this knowledge that keeps her going, from bar fight to bar fight, until there isn’t a night where she doesn’t stumble back to whichever hotel she’s staying in, bloodied and drunk. This isn’t what Kaito and Shuichi would want, she thinks, but it’s the only thing that feels good anymore. She has nothing left to love, so she settles for liking the feeling of her fist breaking someone’s nose.

She wonders what they were truly like, before the game; whether Kaito really was a psychopath, whether Shuichi really had nothing to live for. At least, in the case of Shuichi’s suicide, Maki _wants_ to believe that, when he drank the poison, he was desperate and not thinking straight. If it were to have been the result of years of compulsive planning, she doesn’t think she could handle knowing that his friendship with her and Kaito hadn’t changed him at all.

There’s always a last time. A last smile, a last laugh, a last training session. And, at the end of her life, a last fight. She knows that five versus one isn’t fair, and she can logically come to the conclusion that at least one of them will have a weapon, but she can’t bring herself to care.

Bleeding out on the floor of some distant alley, she looks to the sky and finds that every single star is covered by a thick layer of clouds. She was born alone, and she dies alone, her name an attachment to a personality that she doesn’t have; a Team Danganronpa brand, and nothing else. She closes her eyes, thinking that Maki Harukawa was never a real person anyway. With this, she dies, her face tight-lipped into an expressionless mask.

* * *

 

_But damn, it’s nice to see them again._

**Author's Note:**

> You can take that final sentence and call it a happy ending because that's all I'm giving ya. Anyway, hope you liked this! It was something I wrote really quickly, but I like the idea. Leave a comment if you can, they make writing even more worth it. And, as always, have a great day!


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